Page 18 of The Echo Wife
But something low in my belly kept twisting at the way Martine had asked why she couldn’t sleep. I imagined her lying there in the dark—newly pregnant, exhausted, knowing that she wouldn’t get an extra minute of rest no matter how hard she tried. Knowing that, when the baby arrived, there would be no promise of respite.
No specimen was ever meant to live for as long as Martine had. No specimen was ever meant to endure this kind of responsibility. Clones were intended to be created for a purpose, and when that purpose was fulfilled, they were supposed to be finished.
The twist in my belly wasn’t guilt. I don’t regret that—why would it have been guilt? Martine’s continued existence was wrong. It was an insult to the very science that had created her. It was a perversion of her own programming. And now, because of that—because of Nathan’s decision to twist my work and make a woman who would live and live and live—I had a failure to contend with. A product was being used in a way it was never designed to be used, and that misuse was highlighting a weakness in my work. It couldn’t stand.
It wasn’t guilt. But it wasn’t far removed from guilt, either.
I drained my wineglass and returned to the kitchen for the bottle. I listened hard, but I couldn’t hear Martine. I wondered if Nathan had programmed her to work silently, to cry silently.
I wondered if he had programmed her to be able to cry at all.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
I would have loved to experience some kind of relief after leaving Martine’s house. But I went back to a place that was only barely mine. The town house fit me like a brand-new shoe, and it grated at me, knowing that Martine was ensconced in creaseless linens and fragrant soaps while I stumbled around in my nest of boxes and packing paper.
I suppose that kind of place is my natural habitat. The house I grew up in was only ever a house, not a home. It had looked older than it was, stonework on the outside with climbing ivy that my mother dutifully guided onto trellises, to prevent it from ruining the foundation. There were exposed beams on the inside, dark wood and white walls and more fireplaces than really made sense. The rooms were huge and drafty, the ceilings low, the doorways small. Every closet was lined with built-in shelves that were a little too shallow and a little too close together.
I remember that house as being huge and baffling, full of dark corners and hiding places. I suspect now that my memory is shaded by the kind of life I had there. It was a place that could have been charming, if only it had been entirely different.
My father’s study was a mystery to me when I was a child. It was a whole room in that house that was dedicated only to his work. The rest of the house was connected—the living room and kitchen both led into the dining room via open arches, doorways with no doors in them, and the bedrooms were isolated upstairs,ranged along a narrow hallway at the top of the stairs. But my father’s study was its own room, set back under the stairs with a huge, heavy oak door.
When that door was closed, my mother and I were to stay quiet, to avoid disturbing his work. When it was open, we stayed quiet for altogether different reasons.
There were two chairs in the study—the one behind his desk, where I was not permitted to tread, and the one in front of his desk. That second chair existed for one purpose: our appointments. Once a week, and once a week only, I was invited to sit in that chair and ask my father a question.
My mother told me later that these appointments began as a result of my incessant childhood curiosity. I was relentless, she said. I wanted to know why everything was the way it was, and how it might be changed. By establishing a time during which I was permitted to interrupt his work, my father kept me from being too constant a nuisance. He corralled the disruption I represented, turned it into a discrete period of time during which I was allowed to demand his attention.
That was my mother’s story. My father said that the appointments began because he saw “great intellectual potential” in me. He liked to maintain narratives like that, ones that portrayed him as having keen insight.
My father also said that I was allowed to ask him any question, any at all. This, of course, was a lie. I learned what kinds of questions were actually acceptable when I was six years old. It’s an appointment I will never forget.
He was telling me about the science behind magnets that day. I sat across from him, my feet swinging off the edge of my chair. I picked at my fingernails, one of the only things I could safely pick at in his presence, one of the only fidgets he wouldn’t notice so long as I kept my hands in my lap. His explanations were concise and direct, thorough, never condescending. He was a good teacher.
He had been speaking and drawing diagrams for close to thirty minutes—I know, because he kept a thirty-minute hourglass onhis desk to ensure that each of my questions received an appropriate amount of answering, and the top half of the glass was nearly empty.
My father stopped at the end of a sentence about polarity, looked at me, and asked if I had any additional questions. He always asked this, and I was intended to respond that I did not, because the hourglass was nearly empty and there was not time for further discussion. But I hadn’t yet come to understand that unspoken rule, and so, foolishly, I said that I did have another question.
I asked him why my mother had been in bed all day.
I wasn’t trying to be impertinent—I hadn’t understood my weekly meetings with my father to be limited to scholarly discussions. There were so many things I didn’t understand yet. He said that I could ask him anything, and so I thought it was all right to ask about her.
His flat, gray eyes stared into mine. Anger flashed behind his veneer of calm like the scales of the fish that darted under the surface of the pond in my mother’s garden.
He reached across the table and gripped my jaw in one hand. His fingers dug into the soft edges of my chin until they found the resistance of bone. In that moment, I became aware of the baby fat that was still on my face, and I felt a mortifying flush of relief at the way it still cushioned me.
“Try that again,” he said, and the danger in his voice made my blood go still. I remember watching his face, trying to figure out where I’d gone wrong. Was it the way I’d asked the question? My tone of voice? Had I said a bad word?
I swallowed hard. My jaw ached in his grip. I tried again, my words flattened by immobility. “I’m sorry,” I said, and at last, he let me go. I hesitated before deciding on how to proceed.Try again,he’d said, and so I knew that I must try again, and I must get it right this time. Trying again and failing was not an option. Heat began to flood the lower half of my face, and I knew that it would be red where his fingers had dug into my skin.
I tried again. “Could someone reverse the polarity of a magnet?”
When he favored me with a smile, my stomach sank with the weight of relief: I’d gotten it right. He turned the hourglass again, and spent another thirty minutes or so explaining various theories around polarity manipulation, the scale of experiments on the subject, concerns within the scientific community about the risk of increasing the scale of those experiments. I listened well enough to ask a few more questions—well enough that later, when he quizzed me, I would remember what I was supposed to. But fear hissed in the back of my mind. Fear of the grip he’d had on my jaw. Fear of the promises made by that barely restrained anger in his eyes.
When he sent me to bed, he grabbed my jaw again, gentler this time, though I still flinched. There was no anger in his touch this time. He looked into my eyes to make sure I was paying attention.
“Never apologize just because you think someone is mad at you,” he said. “Never let anyone make you say that you’re sorry just to appease them.” His eyes darted between mine, back and forth, faster than I could follow. “No one respects a coward, Evelyn. Never apologize. Do you understand?”
